in its first iteration, it strips all AI shit, doesn’t just disable it; the hero went through the source tree and patched it by hand!
it differs from LibreWolf and friends as there’s an intention to hard-fork the thing (LW should be based on basebrowser) and let the abomination that is the mozilla shell-game-corp of today behind, thus returning to the original idea behind creating mozilla, best described by the dude who gave us the thing:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116994970688711387
the patch repo: https://codeberg.org/basebrowserproject/organization
firefox repo: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
build instructions: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html
the only thing missing’s how to apply the patch. it’s as simple as going to the firefox source folder and applying the patch file with:
patch -p1 < the.patch
and then proceed with ./mach build.
this was my first time building firefox from source and it wasn’t half as bad; about 30ish minutes on an i7-870 in the background without any excessive load that woulda made the system unusable.
“There’s a new initiative” is doing a fuck of a lot of lifting from “someone on Mastodon said they’re going to try”.
Right. Let me know if in 5 years there is a steady team of people still working on this. Any programmer can grab the source code and make a few modifications and release it. However it takes a lot of effort/dedication to maintain something for the years needed to be good/useful.
But the first step of all that is someone starting it. Without that first person nothing will ever happen. It might succeed, or not, but someone trying is a good thing regardless.
The first step is NOT announcing that you are doing this though. Writing announcements are easy, I’ve seen many over the years. Only a few have turned into a real large project.
You’re most definitely wrong here because the first step is to announce something like this because a project like this requires gathering a significant number of contributors.
They’re trying to hard fork Firefox, which means they are trying to take on the engineering efforts of hundreds of full time engineers who are browser development experts. To keep up with bugs, web standards, security patches, and performance. Nevermind new feature development.
I’m pretty pessimistic about it tbf.
Well, it builds and runs, and according to their new post on Mastodon a group of people have reached out and tested the patches and there is additional work done. That’s beyond just an announcement in my book. How many real large projects have you seen where nobody took the first step?
It’s not wrong tho. There’s a new initiative. That’s all what one-person-or-more projects are when they begin, before they gain any traction.
And, so far, they are showing lots more than all the other wannabes and nobodies who complain the same on the internet but don’t deliver.
Hence my point: announcing “a new initiative” doesn’t denote an actual amount of demonstrated momentum, but it certainly connotes it.
Dude, it’s a patch on top of main that removes Firefox’s tepid, trivially disabled AI features. What do you mean “lots more”? lmao this is tantamount to a strongly worded letter about Firefox’s inclusion of LLM tools.
Dude, a strongly worded letter does not change any code.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tantamount
My point if you didn’t get it is that this has basically the same effect as expressing strong disagreement – inasmuch as it’s extremely likely this won’t see any meaningful usage or development and will quickly fizzle out.
Source: worked two years on a FOSS project vastly less important, complex, dangerous, and time-sensitive than a web browser.
Source 2: Obviousness.
If you couldn’t make bunk, don’t piss your bad luck on other people. At least they are trying. Booing projects before they lead anywhere (or nowhere) is not really helpful in our circumstances.
Ladybird for example got their hurras (and their boos) and then went down in flames because of being fascist nutjobs. They had their chance, they blew it, but they had their chance.
I made small but meaningful contributions to a reasonably well-known project still used by millions of people.
Maybe don’t assume I made bunk just because I have an iota of humility to acknowledge that a hard fork of a modern web browser announced by someone on Mastodon who spent a collective five hours patching main is a pipedream.